SECRET LIVES

"Enigma" and "World Traveler."

There is one compelling reason to catch “Enigma,” the new Michael Apted film. The reason, it must be said, lasts less than a second; nevertheless, how else are you going to see Mick Jagger dressed as a pilot in the Royal Air Force? The scene is a lighthearted night in blacked-out England, during the Second World War. The camera is poking its nose into a crowd of revellers, and there, suddenly, is a blink of Old Rubber Lips. The thought that “Enigma” might feature a rolling sequence of cameos by the Stones forced me to the brink of my seat. Any chance of Squadron Leader Ronnie Wood playing Air Force guitar? Or Vice-Admiral Sir Keith Richards stuck up in the crow's nest, where he so inarguably belongs? Tragically, it was not to be, and I had to resign myself to the fact that Mick had commandeered a role purely in his capacity as one of the film's producers. He is the right man for the job, since he has long been fascinated by the saga of Enigma—which, in case you were wondering, is a machine.

The Enigma was used by the Germans for the encryption of naval and military messages. In essence, the legend runs as follows: Enigma codes were designed to be unbreakable, and the British broke them. The decoding was done at Bletchley Park, a monstrous country house halfway between Oxford and Cambridge. Its purposes demanded the clearest and, in every sense, the most curious brains in the country, with eccentricities to match; at the end of a visit to Bletchley, Churchill is rumored to have said that when he urged the recruiting team to leave no stone unturned he didn't realize that they would take it literally. Still, it was later estimated that the efforts of the Bletchley code-breakers had shortened the war by two years, in which case the clutch of eggheads—mathematicians, chess players, crossword-compilers, many of whom were unfit for active service, presumably because no helmets could be found to protect their giant craniums—did more to alleviate human misery than any other outfit in the Allied cause. The irony is that for decades none of them received recognition; Bletchley remained so secret that, officially, it never existed. Only in the nineteen-seventies did the veil lift, and since then the intricacies of that period have become, to historians and others, a proud obsession.

Hence “Enigma,” the 1995 novel by Robert Harris, who somehow turned a tale of cloistered minds into a best-selling thriller; and hence Apted's film, which has to perform that same delicate trick in the more exposing arena of a movie. That it doesn't work is a shame, but no surprise, because what seemed, on the page, like a question of tonal balance resolves itself into an impossible pitch: “Enigma” is, to be blunt, “No Way Out” meets “Revenge of the Nerds,” and the meeting is not a happy one. The script is by Tom Stoppard, who, of all people, should have thrilled to the seductions of a language game, yet even he is confounded by the indigestible. We get Tom Jericho (Dougray Scott), a young Cambridge mathematician, who, after a nervous collapse, is summoned back to Bletchley to aid the fight against Shark, a German code with added teeth. Much of the pleasure of the cryptanalyst's world lies in the naming of techniques: strip, drop, break, pinch, crib, whisper, kiss—these are the tools of the trade, fondly culled from the slang of the lover, the burglar, and the sneak. Shark is employed by German U-boats in the North Atlantic as they hunt for British and American merchant ships, stocked with men and supplies. Unless Jericho and his friends can solve the Shark conundrum, the submarines, untracked by Allied boats, will be free to close and kill.

Also present—and, at times, ominously absent—are Claire Romilly (Saffron Burrows), a Bletchley clerk with whom Jericho conducts an affair; Hester Wallace (Kate Winslet), another clerk, but plumper and bespectacled, and therefore less open to suspicion; a clan of Jericho's supernumerate colleagues, one of whom, Logie (Tom Hollander), smokes a pipe even though he appears to be coming up to his ninth birthday; and, lastly and smoothly, a vision in gray flannel from the intelligence services, who goes by the name of Wigram (Jeremy Northam). He is perturbed by the thought of information seeping out of Bletchley; more important, he is the only source of anti-earnest behavior in the whole picture. Northam breezes through the byways of the story, effortlessly cracking its code of pensive repression, and fully aware that when the fate of the free world is at stake your only option is to shrug it off with a smile. Everything around him is a mass of corrugated foreheads, panicky eyes, and haggard, sleepless dawns; the endeavors of Bletchley may have been of incalculable weight, but do the performers have to look quite so laden down? Winslet, who radiates an air of determined jollity, should be well tuned to the nineteen-forties, yet the film somehow gets in her way, refusing to view her as more than a propellant of the plot; as for Dougray Scott, last seen having a motorcycle fight at the end of “Mission: Impossible 2,” I am starting to wonder if Tom Cruise ran over his big toe or something, because the pain is still writ large upon his brow.

Things heat up in the final reel, but the redemption comes too late; nor, to be honest, am I entirely clear why it has to take place on a remote jetty in Scotland. If we must have action movies starring a man in a tweed jacket, that man has to be Robert Donat, and we need the juicy, amusable tones of Alfred Hitchcock telling him what to do; but action cannot bloom out of inaction just for the sake of it, and Apted cannot escape, whether via jetty or alternative means, the stubborn fact that the joys of Harris's book were doggedly undramatic. They were the joys of period deprivation, of frosted nights in Cambridge rooms, of whale meat and powdered eggs—the comically awful ingredients of a serious sacrifice, from which Britain, forever knotted in the tangle of duty and discomfort, has never quite recovered. They also serve who only sit and think: such was the uncryptic lesson of Bletchley, and it holds good for peace as well as war—for almost any conditions, indeed, apart from those which prevail in cinema. Tarkovsky might have got a movie out of it, but not Mick Jagger.

The new film from Bart Freundlich, who made “The Myth of Fingerprints,” is called “World Traveler,” although the voyager in question, Cal (Billy Crudup), fails to rack up a single frequent-flier mile in the course of the movie. In fact, he never even leaves his native land. Cal's itinerary passes from sea to shining sea, starting in New York and winding up in Oregon; it is the tale of a roving eye, poised between a journey of self-discovery and a rake's progress, although a less tasteful and reflective film, one with a more vulgar spirit of inquiry, might have stumbled upon the radical possibility that the two can be the same.

Cal has a wife and young son in New York, whom he leaves without warning or farewell. (Their anguish at losing him, which must be harsh and specific compared with his nebulous unease, is barely touched upon.) He stops at a diner, and ends up in bed with a waitress (Karen Allen); later, he befriends a construction worker named Carl (Cleavant Derricks), although the effect of that friendship is to drag Carl back to the booze and almost cuckold him; then comes a hitchhiker, Meg (Liane Balaban), who is so lovely and unscrewy that she and Cal have no option but to part; finally, Cal takes up with Dulcie (Julianne Moore), a headlong drinker with problems—otherwise known as malignant fantasies—of her own. Much of this is managed with finesse, and Freundlich casts ravishing glances at the passing landscape, with its pairing of the downbeat and the monumental—Dairy Queens and 7-Elevens crouched at the feet of elephantine hills. But a sense of striving overpowers the movie, and any deftness is sunk by the realization that Cal is heading for a rapprochement with his estranged father (David Keith); all the women along the way, it transpires, were just signposts, therapeutic markers, on the path to a Guy Thing. I worry about Billy Crudup; when you are insanely good-looking, you need to ration your high-cheekbone roles, with their instant solemnity, and loosen up with comedy, light or low. The scooter-riding, self-deprecating Gregory Peck of “Roman Holiday” was twice as memorable as his Ahab, and the Crudup of “Almost Famous” was both hairier and more appealing than the tortured womanizer of “World Traveler.” Couldn't Cal have just stayed home, grown a mustache, and called his dad on the phone? ♦